Trusting broken

Brokenness really highlights the instabilities in life. It can make everything feel scary, and thus finding your bearings or feeling grounded and certain of anything becomes harder. Often broken people, trauma victims especially, are vulnerable to lies and deception as a result of distrust in our own judgement.

If you didn’t save yourself from a bad experience before, then you may rely entirely on others opinions to find direction – I know I did, and I sometimes still do – because you don’t trust yourself to accurately perceive truth. This can breed codependency, and also make it easier to become victim to narcissists and cult-like groups.

Others may have trusted someone and been hurt, and as a result they now are extremely distrusting of others. They reject others so intensely that they will only look to themselves, or more dangerously in our age of social media, they may look only to their own ‘bubbles’ and spheres of influence to find acceptable ‘reality’. It breeds a hostile ‘us vs them’ mentality, outsiders are wrong and can’t be trusted, and so broken people with this behavior may be vulnerable to ideological isolation and extremism.

Falling into either extreme isn’t so uncommon, which is why we so often see broken people as such loud voices of rebellion and dissent, or silenced cult members and abuse victims; at it’s heart the issues come back most often to wanting to protect others from experiencing their same pain, or to protect oneself from experiencing pain again.

Now, not all cult members or people with extreme ideologies are trauma victims- I’m not saying that, only that trauma victims are more susceptible than the average population to fall under the spells of these groups because of dysfunctional trust.

How we can truly protect ourselves and others is by learning, growing, questioning, and changing ourselves and knowing what is worth trusting. It all starts with one important topic:

Truth?

Asking ourselves about truth is the starting point. Is there such a thing as truth? How do we know? Why does it matter? How do we live our lives as a result of the existence – or absence – of truth? Can we trust anything to be true? Can truth be known?

That’s a lot to get into in one post, so that’s what we’ll discuss in our upcoming series "What is Truth?"